Abstract
The aim of this article is to show how young people in Italy deal with the structural injunction to become individuals. While there is a substantial number of works on how institutions converge in promoting individualization and an ‘entrepreneurial self’, in this article we investigate how young people give shape and meaning to social relations in the framework of the injunction to become autonomous entrepreneurs of themselves. The research presented here was conducted in Milan, from 2017 to 2019. We carried out 40 in-depth interviews with young people in order to explore (1) how individualization as a structural historical process becomes an ongoing accomplishment, a part of the ‘common sense’ that people use to interpret their everyday experience; and (2) the extent to which individualization and individualism intertwine and conflict with each other.
Introduction
The aim of this article is to show how young people deal with the social injunction to be active and creative individuals. By considering the voices of young people living in Milan, we explore, on the one hand, how individualization as a historical process becomes a goal and an ongoing accomplishment, part of the ‘common sense’ that young people use to describe themselves and interpret their experience. On the other hand, we analyse how, and to what extent, individualization and individualism intertwine, when and how they conflict with each other, and how situational and individual characteristics affect the capacity to imagine and enact new forms of social relationships. In this way, we suggest, it is possible to highlight how individualization is, at the same time, a form of self-discipline and a way in which individuals can find self-fulfilment, and try to make sense of their experience by also devising new forms of cooperation and sharing. We are interested in analysing how young people – raised amid the pervasive neoliberal rhetoric of the importance of being proactive and creative – put into practice, in their interactions with others, the injunction to focus on developing personal skills; but also how – in spite of a desire for autonomy transformed into self-management – individualization can be tackled with new forms of sociation.
In the following sections, we first situate ourselves in the current sociological debate on individualization, clarifying the distinction between individualization and individualism; we then present the setting of our research and describe the different ways in which the interviewees experienced individualization with respect to the hegemonic neoliberal cultural pattern of the ‘entrepreneurial self’. In the concluding section, we discuss how individualization can be related to an idea of sharing and acting in concert with others, avoiding a restrictive homology between individualization and individualism.
Framing Individualization
Individualization is a long-standing process in western society. We can say, following Tocqueville (1835) in Democracy in America, that it is one of the pillars of modern society. It puts, in an innovative manner in human history, strong emphasis on the importance of the single individual, of her/his rights, opinions and tastes. Through the Enlightenment and economic liberalism, the institutionalization of the individual as the basis for the project of constructing oneself as one’s own masterpiece, was considered one of the aspects that marked the emergence of modernity itself.
In analytical terms, individualization has recently been viewed as the never-ending process of becoming an individual (Bauman, 2001; Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Giddens, 1990; Melucci, 1996). In this perspective, individualization is a structural and historical phenomenon: it is imposed on the individual by modern institutions (Beck, 2007), even though in post-industrial society it has become a non-linear process of transformation no longer with stable bases such as the welfare state, the family, the school or a specific profession. The term ‘individualization’ is intended to stress that individuals are forced, by the logic itself of modernization, to make themselves the masters of their own destinies, to become self-reflexive, constantly monitoring their actions and to perceive their actions and destiny as consequences of their choices rather than as consequences of social structural forces (Atkinson, 2010a). This highlights the ambivalence that characterizes the current process of individualization: it is, at the same time, a structural constraint and an injunction to overcome structural constraints. On the one hand, individualization signals the affirmation of the idea that self-determination, resourcefulness and autonomy have become social skills essential for acting successfully and obtaining the desired results. On the other hand, it refers to the precariousness, risk and uncertainty within which one is forced to act and that undermine the conditions for independent life plans (Sennett, 1998). The most commonly suggested way out of these ambivalent institutionalized injunctions is to insist shortsightedly and reproachfully on self-responsibility (Trnka and Trundle, 2014). Thus, individualization becomes a way to construct oneself in an unpredictable environment, where the emphasis on merits and personal skills becomes largely supported by current neoliberal culture: ‘Social critique is transformed into self-critique, resulting in a prevalence of self-doubt and anxiety. Competition too seems to be self-directed, suggesting that entrepreneurial subjects compete with the self, and not just with others’ (Scharff, 2016: 108).
The connection with the neoliberal idea of the free-market individual highlights a specific psychologized, internalized, aspect of individualization ‘built around cultivating the “right” kind of disposition for surviving in neoliberal society: aspiration, confidence, resilience’ (Gill, 2017: 610), to which we can add creativity, risk-taking and the myth of individual achievement. In this regard, scholars have highlighted how subjectivities re-elaborated under neoliberalism foster the development of an ‘entrepreneurial self’ (Bröckling, 2016; Du Gay, 1996; Rose, 1992) characterized by creativity, innovation, flexibility, willingness to take risks and the capacity to assume responsibility for oneself and one’s choices. In this case, individualization is a form of discipline and control, one of the main dimensions of neoliberal governmentality, engaged in replacing a ‘homo oeconomicus as partner of exchange with a homo oeconomicus as entrepreneur of himself’ (Foucault, 2008: 226).
Confidence in personal capacities has acquired the role of a moral value and a criterion of justness. Faced with uncertainty concerning work, a credible path to achieving autonomy, a certain degree of emotional, professional and economic security, young people are encouraged to work on themselves, to cultivate creativity, ‘employability’ and ‘soft skills’ (Colombo and Rebughini, 2019a; Farrugia, 2018). Public agencies – education systems, employment services, welfare state – private enterprises, political and media discourses, experts, relatives, friends and guidebooks encourage and oblige young people to seek self-sufficiency and self-realization, acquire skills and formal qualifications, be responsive, active and lead a healthy lifestyle (Börner et al., 2020; Kelly, 2013). As Bröckling (2016) notes, the subject has to become an expert of oneself and a self-initiating participant of the market in a ‘contract society’.
While individuals are taught ‘to be active and creative, to show initiative and to believe optimistically in the success of personal efforts’, they are also asked to ‘submit to the fateful order of the market that regularly and increasingly fails and frustrates the efforts of the many’ (Rehmann, 2013: 287). Personal skills, capacity to act and the ability to take advantage of opportunities are considered to be indispensable moral qualities of an individual and they have become a philosophy of life, a source of self-esteem, as well as a way to evaluate the worthiness of oneself and others.
As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 97) claim, this kind of entrepreneurial subjectivity highlights how self-criticism and self-improvement, typical of the modern bourgeois process of individualization, is today mainly a response ‘to demands for authenticity and freedom, which have historically been articulated in interrelated fashion by the “artistic critique”; and that it sets to one side the issues of egoism and inequalities traditionally combined in the “social critique”’.
Hence, although connected to it, individualization can be usefully distinguished from individualism. Individualism is commonly understood as a personal attitude or preference; it refers to the weakening of bonds of solidarity and the concomitant entrenchment of the idea that, in order to be successful, individuals can only ‘bowl alone’ (Putnam, 2000). It stresses that modern competitive societies with their insistence on the independent individual are promoting the disposition to be a ‘loner’, a free rider. In this view, individualism pushes persons to be egocentric, narcissistic and competitive in order to affirm their uniqueness (Lasch, 1979; Lipovetsky, 1983; Mau, 2015). Rivalry, meritocracy and moral relativism become the compass that guides individuals in the solitary battle for the affirmation of individual autonomy and success (Flanagan and Lee, 2003).
Individualism is a possible (but not necessary) consequence of individualization. Although there is an obvious and close link between the two concepts, it is theoretically and analytically useful to maintain a clear distinction between them. The drive for individualization does not necessarily equate to a relentless drive for individualism and self-referentiality (Elliott and Lemert, 2006; Martuccelli, 2010). Individualized persons are not necessarily isolated individuals; rather, they are involved in creating social relationships of a new kind that take account of individuality and require the individual’s capacity to act as an autonomous agent. People need others to be able to constantly improve their selves and increase the skills necessary to cope with everyday uncertainties. They are thus constantly subject to the tension between, on the one hand, being protagonists and relying only on their own strength, and on the other, awareness of their shortcomings, the weakness of their personal means in the face of risks, uncertainties, powers and dynamics that are systemic.
The focus on oneself, on one’s own autonomy or self-realization cannot be separated from the kind of social bonds in which a person is involved; structural tendencies towards individualization are always reworked and adapted to the level of experience, attitudes and personal expectations. As we shall highlight in the following sections, this can foster new forms of cooperation among individualized subjects facing common experiences of uncertainty and complexity, precariousness of work and isolation. If individualization is the common historical and structural background, the entrepreneurial self can be reflexively criticized and tempered by collective experiences of ‘self-cooperation’.
A substantial number of works have focused on the logic of individualization, and on how institutions (Fernández-Herrería and Martínez-Rodríguez, 2016; Genov, 2018), education (Down, 2009; Peters, 2001), welfare agencies (Kallinen and Häikiö, 2021; Wright, 2016), labour market (Atkinson, 2010b; Farrugia, 2019), political and media discourses (Howard, 2007; Littler, 2017), experts (Rose, 1998), guidebooks and popular advice books (Bröckling, 2016) combine to promote an entrepreneurial self. Converging in this notion are historical institutional processes of individualization and cultural expressions of individualism typical of the neoliberal environment. Yet this convergence enhances heterogenous pathways. In sections four and five, we add empirical insights to the exploration of the entrepreneurial self among young people: the strategies that they adopt to cope with uncertainty, and the constant pressure to be autonomous, creative, flexible, as well as the aspiration to create new forms of cooperation that they then develop.
Research and Methods
The neoliberal setting frequented by the generation of young Italians that we considered concerns a particular institutional context, at least in part different from that of other European countries. In particular, the issuance of public debt has caused a gradual recession for 20 years. It has deprived the State of any instrument that could mitigate its impact by strengthening the welfare state and preventing the impoverishment of the public school–university system. Thus, neoliberalism in Italy has raised inequality to record levels, with an employment rate of just over 50% of the labour force and wages among the lowest in Europe. Moreover, a discourse reproduced as much by the national mass media as it is exploited by various political parties has reinforced a rhetoric of individual choice and superimposed the figure of the consumer on that of the citizen.
With regard to the effects of these policies, the Italian context certainly resembles other situations in Europe and beyond. In fact, the main issue concerns how neoliberalism promotes the assumption that the free market is a fair system where the talented and hard-working can overcome all obstacles and achieve greater success (Brown et al., 2011). However, since the perceptions of choice and control are necessarily related to the distinct institutionalized pathways that are available to young people, it is important ‘to explore the individualization thesis with caution and through a highly contextualized lens’ (Franceschelli and Keating, 2018: 5). Adopting this perspective, we based our empirical analysis on the belief that the distinctive features of the Italian institutional context could enable us to grasp unprecedented aspects of individualization processes.
The research was conducted in Milan from 2017 to 2019 by carrying out 40 in-depth interviews with young people. We recruited participants in three main ways. First, we began with convenience sampling by contacting three secondary schools, which garnered 26 interviewees: 14 of them were lyceum students, and 12 of them attended vocational school. Ten other respondents were young people that we reached by spending time with a group of university students active in a squatted social centre. Finally, by means of snowball sampling, we located the final four interviewees among young adults engaged in political parties. Overall, the recruitment strategy, besides ensuring a basic socio-demographic distribution by gender (22 females, 18 males), age (from 18 to 31) and educational qualification, aimed at obtaining a variety of situations, resources and, in general, social positionings with respect to future expectations and the management of uncertainty by respondents.
The interviews were conducted by the authors. They were audio-recorded and were structured by incorporating some agreed common themes, but they followed the structure of an everyday conversation as closely as possible. The interviews were transcribed verbatim, anonymized and pseudonyms were given. They varied in length, within a range of 45 to 120 minutes.
The purpose of the interviews was to explore three major issues:
First, the social origin of the respondents, eliciting accounts about their everyday lives in the family and at school, trying to explore the extent to which these areas were experienced as triggers of constraints or instead of opportunities in terms of individual development.
Second, social recognition and generational belonging, trying to determine how the respondents were able to think about themselves in collective terms, for example when they used ‘we’, and what rights and duties they recognized and claimed.
Third, future aspirations, investigating how the interviewees justified and accounted for their current individualized situation.
All the interviews were read separately by the three authors of this article, who encoded the main themes that emerged (Holstein and Gubrium, 1995). Comparisons were then made among the different encodings, verifying and tuning the encoding process when necessary, and selecting the codes considered most significant. The texts of the interviews were then read again separately using the selected codes. Finally, we carried out a twofold and parallel work of synthesis: on the one hand, for each interview, we prepared a file with the most relevant extracts in relation to the selected topics; on the other hand, we prepared, for each code, a file with a synthesis of all the narrations referring to that specific code. The interpretative work was based on these synthesis files. The familiarity of the researchers with the interviews due to repeated reading and encoding work, however, enabled them to collocate the single excerpts within the more general framework of the interview.
The Pattern of the Entrepreneurial Self
A substantial part of our interviews focused on respondents’ expectations about the future, especially in relation to work and what they considered to be a fulfilling and satisfying life. When asked what conditions and personal characteristics they thought were necessary to achieve this result, expressions such as ‘personal commitment’, ‘effort’, ‘determination’, ‘perseverance’, ‘adaptability’ and ‘creativity’ were most frequently used.
The words of our respondents evidenced their internalization of a strong injunction to be entrepreneurs of their selves (Bröckling, 2016). They considered it a personal duty to cultivate themselves as persons of value (Farrugia, 2019), continuing to work on themselves, with determination and passion, to become what they ought to be: (valuable) individuals. When they expressed the qualities that they deemed necessary to succeed in the labour market and, more generally, in life, the interviewees talked about personal initiative, passion, willingness to take risks, ability to seize opportunities: [To succeed in achieving personal goals] you must definitely have a great desire to act . . . in my opinion, you must also be stubborn and know what you want . . . because in the end you have to be very determined in life . . . it’s very important . . . because if you don’t know what you want, you can’t ever achieve it. So, you must be very determined . . . and want to keep doing something until you do it . . . wanting to continue by any means. (Elisabetta, F, 20, Lyceum) [In order to find a good job] in my opinion you must be highly committed . . . that is, I start from the assumption that you immediately see people who maybe don’t want to do anything and if they have to do something, maybe they do it wrong. What you need are the will and in any case the commitment to give of your best . . . You have to be able to constantly improve . . . I am determined. If there is a job to do, I usually don’t shy away from it. Or, if there is a problem, I try to solve it; that is, I don’t leave it there, waiting for it to resolve itself, I get busy. (Paolo, M, 21, Vocational school)
As is explicit, here the vocabulary of ‘commitment’, ‘constantly improving’ and ‘problem solving’ is taken for granted as the language with which to speak about the possibility of a better future. Adopting the self-entrepreneurial perspective, our interviewees often declared that ‘everything depends on you’ or, as Marta (F, 19, Lyceum) stated: ‘if there is no commitment, you will not get anywhere . . . and then you must be determined’. This internalized injunction to do, to be active and creative is not supported by an idea of omnipotence or by the goal of changing the world for the better, of dominating and taming it. It is rather rooted in the idea that ‘not doing’ would be an error and that ‘doing’ is a way not to be left behind or excluded, to prove to yourself that you can make it.
Likewise to Scharff’s (2016: 114) findings, interviewees who stressed the importance of always thinking positively and adopting a positive attitude stated that, notwithstanding moments of difficulty, they trusted in their personal capacity to cope with uncertainties. They expressed confidence that, if they tried hard, they would be able to overcome temporary obstacles. In their narratives, they supported the idea that meritocracy, in the end, is the criterion that prevailed in evaluating the personal capacities and the skills that they were acquiring at school or university.
As other works have shown (Christiaens, 2019; Franceschelli and Keating, 2018), what is important is to believe in oneself and never give up: eventually, ‘personal quality’ will succeed. The meaning attributed to the internalized injunction to be positive, active and constantly improve assumed a slightly different emphasis on the basis of the cultural capital of our respondents, but it did not highlight specific gender differences. Respondents with greater cultural capital, those attending high school or university, tended to interpret the obligation to be proactive and assertive primarily as an injunction to follow their passions, to engage with zeal and involvement in what they were doing. In their narratives, being active entrepreneurs of themselves meant being determined to follow what you preferred to do even if it did not gratify you immediately, in the certainty that the resources acquired – through family, school, social relationships and individual experiences – will be adequate and that, in the end, these investments can be translated into the best profit. Respondents said that they relied heavily on resources acquired with passion: school skills, parental help, travel and volunteering experiences are important resources that can be used with profit both in the professional field and, more generally, in every aspect of life. Cultivating an entrepreneurial self meant collecting as many different experiences as possible, being willing to wait for more favourable situations to arise: The world of work is so full of competitiveness that I believe that . . . you can be, say, very good, but if you can’t keep going, if you don’t push yourself, if you’re not determined enough, you won’t go anywhere. Obviously, you are successful if you have the determination, but then you must also have the skills . . . so I would say that the determination is the first thing, but immediately the skills arrive . . . that’s why to get somewhere you have to show something new . . . something that someone else doesn’t already have . . . and make people understand why they should be interested in you as a new figure. (Marta, F, 19, Lyceum)
The interviewees who were attending a vocational school and who mostly came from families with less cultural capital propounded the idea of developing an entrepreneurial self by emphasizing more the ability to perform the assigned tasks well and independently. Being able to do it yourself and to do it in a competent, even original way, were considered the most valuable features to work on constantly for full realization of oneself. While for interviewees with greater cultural capital, being entrepreneurs of themselves meant above all exploring their skills, accumulating experiences, testing themselves and developing creativity, for those with fewer cultural resources it meant above all learning to be tenacious, reliable and disciplined.
Here the disciplinary character of individualization processes emerges more clearly. Self-realization means behaving in harmony with the expectations of the context, understanding and accepting one’s position, and performing one’s tasks as expected. Being authentic means focusing on the cultivation of skills related to the mobilization of specific personal characteristics that can be developed into task-specific skills. In this regard, the interviewees often focused on the acquisition of skills and experiences to be included in their curriculum vitae; skills that were often seen as the acquisition of external rules, of practices to be carried out in an orderly way. Self-entrepreneurship meant taking up the challenge of adapting and marketing themselves in the current context of uncertainty, promoting capacities for self-regulation that comprise a strong component of discipline and normalization (Dean, 2003): I mean, for me the important thing is to have done [well] . . . I mean, if I have the feeling that I did that particular thing well, I am very happy . . . it already is a success. If your boss says it’s okay, I like it . . . for me, it is a success already. Because in any case it means that what you do, you do it well . . . and if it suits you two three times, four times . . . maybe it will be okay also for the rest of your years . . . because if you put your passion and commitment into it, all the things you do will work well. (Roberto, M, 20, Vocational school)
A pragmatic attitude prevails whereby being an adequate person means being an individual who adapts, who accepts situations and gets the best out of them, knowing that s/he cannot radically change them. An entrepreneurial self is not a self that seeks to revolutionize the world – in the sense of a person capable of the ‘creative destruction’ described by Schumpeter (1943) – but a self that is satisfied with managing it and surviving it. Therefore, as Bröckling (2016) and Scharff (2016) pointed out, practising self-management tends to be individualization understood as a narrative collapsed on individual capacities, ‘personal qualities’, commitment and problem solving. In the following section, we shall illustrate how individualization is pragmatically constructed in relational terms, thus producing forms of sociability which are internally differentiated, for example according to the axis of cultural capital.
Strategies to Come to Terms with the Aloneness of Self-Management
In spite of the ubiquity of the rhetoric of the entrepreneurial self, the idea of individualization included in such rhetoric does not completely overlap with the idea of individualism as self-centred closure. The shared and accepted idea of being solely responsible for one’s own destiny, and the taken-for-granted injunctions to self-management are not necessarily translated into the fate of having to do all this alone. While a large proportion of the respondents interpreted the construction of an entrepreneurial self as an individual task in which all the others are competitors because personal success implies victory over the desire for success of others, also expressed were different ways to try to build new forms of cooperation or, in any case, to mitigate the drive for individualism. This can have different facets, where the presence of the others can play different roles.
The Watchers of the Lone Bowler
The young people who saw the process of individualization as a zero-sum game trusted in their personal capacities to cope with the uncertainties and the difficulties that they encountered in their everyday lives; they did not feel the need to sympathize with others’ similar experiences. Being active, putting oneself to the test, and being entrepreneurial were presented as personal and individual experiences; the necessity to act collectively was rarely mentioned. Being able to respond personally to the challenges of uncertainty and the hard task of being master of one’s own fate was perceived as a proof of autonomy, of personal capacity and self-realization. This group of interviewees likened the neoliberal injunction to the constant demonstration of enthusiasm, flexibility, determination, creativity, innovation and the willingness to take risks, to invest in one’s own personal capacities, while continuously improving one’s skills in order to meet the demands of highly competitive contexts (Scharff, 2016; Trnka and Trundle, 2014). The entrepreneurial self thus becomes a sort of auto-teleological self, governed by a self-referential purpose, where one’s existence is one’s goal and the others are mainly the spectators who ratify that pathway (Colombo and Rebughini, 2019b).
As the following extract neatly illustrates, this implies accepting, at least in general terms, the neoliberal assumption that the free market is a fair system where the talented and hard-working can overcome all obstacles and achieve greater success (Brown et al., 2011): In the course of your life . . . however . . . you have to commit yourself. I mean, you have to set your ideas straight for a moment and understand what you want to do, what can make you happy and look for it. It’s not other people . . . nobody gives you anything for free. It’s not other people who come to you and offer you the job of your life. You must commit yourself, have skills, build yourself . . . construct a picture in which you recognize yourself. At that moment you can find something . . . but you are looking for it. [. . .] Because, in my opinion, today there are not so many opportunities for everyone . . . you just have to look for things . . . you have to be a bit hungry in looking for them. And if you do not have enough character, you can’t do this. [. . .] With this desire, with this hunger, you build yourself . . . maybe with more difficulty than someone who is smarter than you, but you succeed anyway . . . but that means that many persons are excluded. (Emilia, F, 20, Lyceum)
From this particular point of view, individualization is definitely more aligned with individualism and seems to hamper the sharing of experiences and practices; being successful means defeating others, beating them in a competition where everyone ‘bowls alone’ (Putnam, 2000). However, it is also relevant that the others – family, friends, acquaintances – are eventually indispensable and always present to give sense to the self-positioning, even though they are mainly there to encourage, applaud or comfort, as watchers of the ‘lone bowler’.
The Sheltering Community
A more straightforward strategy to connect individualization with new forms of social relations consists in selecting a close group of people one can trust and with whom to share solidarity and mutual help. Facing uncertainty and a very competitive environment, many of the young people interviewed said that they found a safe haven in the family and a limited number of close friends. The sheltering community system still represented a secure reference point for many interviewees; it was within these thick relationships that they found material and psychological help (Rebughini, 2011). Respondents with different cultural capital conceived family – especially kinship – differently. Those with higher educational qualifications felt they could rely on the support of parents to take the time necessary to find satisfactory employment opportunities; they were not forced to accept working conditions which they considered inadequate or unsatisfactory, and could remain in a ‘moratorium’ period waiting for the right career opportunity (Cȏté, 2014): It’s clear that we live in a world very different from the one in which our parents used to live. It’s hard to make a comparison, times are very different now, and we live in a very different socio-historical context. It’s true that we don’t have all the certainties that our parents had in their lives; however, it is also thanks to what our parents achieved that we can now live with some comfort during these years of transition. It’s thanks to what they were able to get that we can now take professional risks and cope with uncertainties. (Carlo, M, 30, University)
Although interviewees in vocational training, especially young women, considered relatives and friends to be a safe and permanent source of psychological help, they were worried about the economic burden they might represent for their families, and they aspired to rapid and complete economic independence: The family is important . . . they can support you. My family is very important, absolutely. I am still in this school for my family. If it weren’t for them, I would have already left in the second or first class [. . .] Let’s say that I have the strength, the tenacity, when I look at my sisters: I do everything for them. I mean, maybe I don’t have the strength to do something, but I look at them and say ‘this thing I want to do for them too’. They give me the will to do so, to find that strength . . . I do it both for myself but also to show others that I am able to do this thing. (Alessia, F, 19, Vocational school)
The Shoal of Fish Strategy
Another relevant strategy described by the interviewees was to join others but remain distinct. The union of different individualities was seen as a way to take advantage of the presence, and skills, of others. ‘Joining a shoal of fish’ – a temporary, dynamic, non-binding association – becomes a way to improve personal opportunities by counting on the presence of others: Well . . . to be successful, personal relationships are certainly important. My goal is to meet people who, even in the not too distant future, can come to work with me. So, definitely, create a bond with people from other disciplines, because with people in my university course we will almost certainly not work together . . . because there is only one manager and the last word is always with her, rightly. So, certainly, make friends with different people because it will be essential to then have contacts, for any project . . . because now the important thing is to have a team, a group of people for which you are responsible . . . steering it. So, having contacts is essential . . . and you must transmit trust and security to these people who will then come to work with you and for you. (Lucia, F, 19, Lyceum)
As our respondents made clear, this is the case when personal autonomy is still safeguarded, but at the same time a possible temporary union – not only in terms of interests but also in those of emotional and collective identification with common values – can better protect the single individual from exterior power relations, and construct temporary solidarities against common enemies. The impermanent network is not a community; rather, it provides contingent support in facing the challenges of individualization (Farrugia, 2018). This strategy seems to reflect the ability to create and exploit networks as a form of building and consolidating the entrepreneurial self. As Boltanski and Chiapello (2005: 130) observe, ‘exploitation of the network form presupposes an ability to establish relations of interdependence and trust, and consolidate them, over the long term’. Being part of a network means not being excluded, and it ensures resources and knowledge. However, it does not imply the rigid constraints imposed by a strong community, nor does it imply the reciprocity expected from belonging to a cooperative community. It is a weak but not ephemeral kind of bond which requires independence and trust.
The Cooperative Entrepreneur
Overall, in the above-reported narratives there was an emphasis on personal merits, self-esteem and the need to be ready to adapt to unpredictable situations. With the sole exception of family relationships and close friendships, other people were rarely mentioned. By contrast, especially interviewees who were politically and civically involved – although they accepted the injunction to be active, flexible and entrepreneurial – explicitly criticized an excessive individualism. The uniqueness of one’s personal life path was perceived in relation to the destiny of other people; recognition was not a self-referential process but was shared in a community with shared attitudes. The respondents were aware of how the hegemonic neoliberal discourse – at school, in the mass media, in politics – induces people to be selfish, to take individual advantages when possible without caring about others. Even though they all declared that they were absorbed in an individualistic culture, for which the sacred autonomy of the modern individual was taken for granted, their cultural enemy was individualism as the social translation of market dynamics in neoliberalism. Naive convictions of self-sufficiency, aestheticization of oneself as exhibitionist practices and inability to recognize one’s weakness in the current economic system were considered as the cultural ground of the struggle. As Pickard (2019) notes, European young people are aware of the inertias of the neoliberal system, such as precariousness, isolation and economic dependency, but they feel the lack of opportunities to oppose them. As strongly evoked by the following excerpt, individualism, rather than individualization, was the true enemy of the insightfulness and critical capacity that interviewees hoped to construct in their social spaces of sharing: Young people constantly hear that there is a crisis, there is unemployment. A student, one of my peers, says: in three, five years I have to start working too, if I get a grade higher than that of those who are next to me I can be more credible . . . This, in my opinion, is the rhetoric of the crisis. That is, this rhetoric is present everywhere. Even the lecturers keep repeating that a career is important. Well, I don’t want to say that it is not important; indeed, if anything, a certain type of meritocracy is desirable, especially when it does not conflict with the rest, for example with the fact that those who are less wealthy but have obvious skills must continue studying up to Master level, and must be helped. For heaven’s sake, I agree; however, this continuous bombardment of suggestions that are certainly true but incomplete, in my opinion, leads even more to individualism. [. . .] Since high school and university they make you believe that the university is the launching pad for the job market. This may be true, but it forces you to assume a very individualistic conception for which you have to study alone and get the best marks; and in the end you’ll have a degree that counts for something and you can be someone, without taking into consideration what others are doing. [. . .] [They] teach you subordination already at high school; and this in my opinion is a cause, I mean, not a cause of disinterest in itself, but one of those things that lead the student to be much more individualistic and less . . . less a social animal. (Elio, M, 22, University)
Interestingly, while interviewees not directly involved in forms of social activism tended to collapse individualization with individualism, those who were politically active, or involved in some kind of voluntary activity, endorsed the former but openly opposed the latter. Thus, while interviewees not directly involved in politics were focused on building an ‘entrepreneurial self’ by adopting an individualistic and competitive behaviour, the politically active ones were more involved in developing a ‘cooperative-entrepreneurial self’: We struggle today to cultivate our interests; we don’t do anything else. And this then becomes a political form, it becomes so out of necessity, because the only way we can defend our interests is to do it together, because the more of us there are, the more strength we have. That is, I believe that the challenge today is that this necessity becomes politics. That is, I believe that politics is no longer representation; it is no longer obtaining power. So, in the end, in my opinion, defending our interests can be done in a very particular way, it is more a way to look for yourself, together with others, to grow together with others, for your own personal formation with others, in a context of relationships that once had to be normal. (Andrea, M, 22, University)
Similar to Arendt’s (1958) idea of ‘acting in concert’, and Butler’s (2015) notion of ‘assembly’, the effort seems that of constructing sociation as a web of alliances, mutual help and reciprocity. Rather than a form of self-management, in this case interviewees sought to construct a new horizon of ‘self-cooperation’ for which the construction of oneself as an autonomous subject was not a solitary auto-referential process, but a collective enterprise based on sharing individualized experiences. The interviewees who felt the need to share their experiences of precariousness, involving themselves in collective initiatives, common spaces of practices and political or civic commitment, gave the notion of sharing a specific and more complex meaning. The experience of sharing was not set in contrast with the contemporary culture of individualization as enhancement of autonomy; rather, it was conceived as an antidote to the entrapment of self-entrepreneurship and internalization of forms of self-discipline. What was considered necessary to share was not just services, or material resources. Instead, it was important to share emotions, experiences, narratives and feelings. There was a need to share everyday life, spaces of intimacy, where it was possible to be listened to and to listen to others.
In this case, the construction of an entrepreneurial self is achieved through ‘the search for a collective project by means of articulating and integrating diversity – as well as a way to express a deep form of indignation’ (Alteri et al., 2016: 717). For these interviewees, shared spaces of political and cultural activities were at the same time spaces of agency and autonomous construction of oneself, and areas for the construction of collective agencies and identities. These were spaces where personal characteristics were fully implemented and could be fully developed, tested and strengthened through sharing opportunities. Hence, they thought that constructing oneself as a true autonomous subject is a difficult enterprise that has to be developed jointly, in a shared space of open and frank dialogue, as the best opportunity to foster personal fulfilment.
Conclusion
The findings of our research highlight the complexity and ambivalent nature of individualization processes among the current generation of young people. Having grown up in a socio-economic environment of neoliberalism, they are acquainted with the contradictions of being asked to solve individually problems that are systemic. Self-entrepreneurship is the main response, but some interviewees are trying to find a new balance between individualization as a societal and historical process, and individualism as a self-referential reaction. While the latter can be seen as an inadequate answer to the complexity and uncertainty of their everyday experience, the former seemed articulated in a variety of possible positionings. The findings of this research address exactly such a range of different possible self-positionings along the continuum between, at one extreme, individualistic egocentric closure, and at the other, individualization as a more complex historical process generating as well new forms of cooperation and sharing, in which the others are fully embedded. In the latter case, we found young people who are certainly individualized, but are nevertheless engaged in the effort to enhance emotional and practical connectiveness.
Such connections take the form of a specific form of assembly, where the construction of a temporary ‘common’ does not erase heterogeneity, difference and individuality. Accordingly, it should be stressed that this idea of sharing and connection is in opposition both to an individualistic search for personal solutions and to identitarian relations. For these young people, acting together with others means neither acting in conformity nor ‘bowling alone’. While the difference and the autonomy of the other is taken for granted, the alliance is based on sharing the practical and existential situations of individualization and the emotional experience related to them.
According to the respondents more reactive to the issue of individualization in their everyday lives – albeit with a variety of evaluations – it is through the intersubjective, dialogical cultivation of personal capacities that a public space of sharing is created. From their point of view, escaping the traps of individualism requires spaces of relationship created by connecting individualizations, where it is possible to improve oneself together with others, rediscovering the importance of dialogue and personal dignity. Only in this way is it possible to become individuals able to resist the commodification of the self fostered by the neoliberal culture.
To sum up, our research shows that there are different facets, and different practical approaches, between such more virtuous attitudes and the simple individualistic version of the entrepreneurial self, because the main imperative seems to be that of preventing the transformation of individualized self-management into fragmentation, isolation and fragility. With different strategies, young people are in fact able to distinguish between individualization and individualism, acknowledging the pitfalls of excessive trust in one own’s capacity to get by on one’s own. Although indirectly, the interviewees recognized the existence of individualization not only as a historical process but also as an individual ‘task’, assigning the actors responsibility for performance of that task and for the consequences of such performance (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001). Because this disposition entails the necessity to develop personal capacities, and to preserve them from possible exploitation by commodification and self-disciplinary practices, some of the interviewees had devised a variety of approaches to cooperation and the sharing of personal experiences. This can be considered an attempt to produce social integration without going back to any unity like a cultural, social or political self-referential community.
The entrepreneurial self, as the historical convergence of individualization processes and individualistic neoliberal attitudes, does not appear to be a monolithic position. The results presented here, even though situated in the specific context of northern Italy, shed light on social processes that can help in specifying the issue of the entrepreneurial self and the related literature. Cultural capital and experiences of civic participation emerge as the main resources with which to develop new forms of individualized connections, alliances and sharing opportunities: that is, new ways to critically perform one’s own status of individualization.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
